That year, we were two years past my dad’s passing; I was still out of work, but had started swimming at the Y(thanks again, Eddie!). Two and half months later, swimming at the Y would lead me to the work I have come to love like life itself; office manager-cum-foster mother to sixty-two young people who have changed my life as much as I’ve helped to change theirs.

As grief for my father transformed me, so the joy of doing this transformed me. And I will miss it (even if it’s only for a short time) more than words can say.
The beauty of a June day like today opens my heart like a flower; but today, that flower is a bleeding-heart.
I miss you, Dad. I miss you, YouthBuild. Until we meet again.

The flowers, left to right: Bleeding-heart, Forget-Me-Not, Pansy, Dianthus

I have always loved the classic June day– warm (not too), breezy (just a bit), sunny, fragrant, ripe with possibility. June is the month my husband was born, so we always start the month with a great celebration and try to keep it going as long as possible….

June is also the month we lost my father, two years ago. It feels like it cannot possibly be that long ago, and at the same time it feels like he’s been gone forever. He visits in my dreams, but rarely says anything. A couple of weeks ago, I dreamed we were driving on a highway (he was driving, I was riding shotgun) and we were driving against traffic. All the other cars– two or three lanes of them– were coming toward us. Suddenly, he put the car in reverse, and we were back in the stream of traffic, just going backwards. That was his solution, to just go with the flow.

I took that dream as a metaphor for grief, at least that was how it felt. Grieving turns your life inside out and upside down. You become unmoored. Nothing is where it was, or where it is supposed to be. You can go for days, weeks, even, and everything will be normal and you’ll think, GOOD, I’m OVER IT, and then something will just hit you, and there you are, crying in the middle of the sidewalk while everyone else just keeps walking.

I don’t think you get over grief. I think you have to have get through it instead. It takes as long as it takes, and there is nothing to be done about it….

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I want to wish everyone a happy, healthy, prosperous new year!2014 sounds almost like a science fiction Star Date to me…this is the year I will turn 60; I remember when 1984 sounded like a science fiction Star date to me, and now that is (almost literally) half a lifetime ago for me. My resolutions are simple:

Lose 30 lbs. by year’s end. (It will make resolution #2 easier…)

Swim a mile and half in laps at one time by my 60th birthday. (For those who don’t know: I made my mile in laps one week after my birthday! WOOT!!)

Blog something every day.
It’ll be easier this year, because what I plan to do is post the day’s page from my page-a-day desk calendar, Illuminations, published by Leap Year LLC.
Here’s the cover:

IIluminations 2014 Desk Calendar

And here’s today’s page:

January 1, 2014 ~ New Year’s Day

So, those are MY resolutions…I’m trying to keep it simple, doable, and well-integrated into the infrastructure of my life as it is, but incorporating more of the things that make me truly happy. One of the true gifts of 2013 was discovering how much I still loved drawing, and to discover that I hadn’t lost my drawing “chops” even though it had been a reallllllly looooooong time since I last picked up a pencil/pen/conte crayon with intent to draw. I never lost my drawing eye, and I guess I’ve been training it all this time.

I plan to LIVE OUT LOUD in 2014! What about you?

What are your resolutions for 2014? And how are you going to make it all happen? Was there something that really worked for you in 2013?
Please share… we can support each other in our intentions to build on successes and throw away what doesn’t work any more.

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Do you suppose that– if the incident had involved, say, a gay student from Stuyvesant or Townsend Harris, or a young blond swim team competitor from Easthampton rather than the person who actually was involved– it would take three weeks (and counting) to begin to get help not only for the witnesses, but for the victim?

And if it had taken three weeks to even begin to get help not only for the witnesses, but for the victim, had the victim been, say, a gay student from Stuyvesant or Townsend Harris, ora young blond swim team competitor from Easthampton– what would the appropriate response be (a) from the victim (b) from the witnesses (c) from the community?

If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?
How about if there are people there to hear it, but they are willfully blind and deaf?
Are the woodland creatures who were crushed by the fallen tree still dead and dying if no one is there to hear them cry out?
How about if there are people there to hear them, but they are willfully blind and deaf?

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Today, I had my first Advanced Swim class (!!!!) with Eddie. Lucky me; I’m the only person in the class so far. The first time I took Intermediate Swim, last March, I was also the only person in the class. In those eight weeks, I made a lot of progress (and learned the breaststroke, for real!)and I expect it will be the same this time.

Today was kicking drills–flutter kick, with a kickboard. I have a weak kick, which is surprising, because I have strong legs. I’ve improved my freestyle in the last few months, but Eddie pointed out it’s because my upper body is doing most of the work. I know that’s true, because I have visible, defined collarbones and biceps for the first time in thirty years. So today was kick, kick, kick, kick, and kick, kick, kick, kick, on one side and then on the other, freestyle; and then backstroke, kick, kick, kick, kick, and kick, kick, kick, kick on one side and then on the other. And, again. And again.

When class was over, I went down to the large pool and swam laps for three quarters of an hour, no stopping. It was only my second time in the last two weeks, because the large pool had been closed for renovations…and it was sublime. I felt like I was slow today, but somehow I got in three in more laps in the same amount of time. Maybe the drills helped more than I thought they would.

I know Eddie is going to have me work on the stuff I don’t like to do (kicking drills) but need to work on (more kicking drills), and I’m going to do what he says (still more kicking drills). It worked with my Breaststroke Problem (where I looked like a crazy frog until I got the timing right), so I know it’ll work with my Kicking Problem.

Next week, I am bringing my fins for drills (five laps with fins, two without, rinse, repeat). I LOVE swimming with fins, so this will be lots of fun. I’ll try to get a finned practice in before next Sunday, too.

So thanks, Eddie, for your patient tutelage. I’m going to do what you say, because you’ve been right about everything from the start, fifty-one weeks ago. I may not like the drills, but I LOVE their effect, and that’s a great life lesson.

Patience attains all it strives for.

(That’s from one of my favorite prayers, by St. Teresa of Avila.)

Illuminations 2014 Calendar Page

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Well, 2012 has been quite the eventful year. I’m really looking forward to this wonderful shiny new 2013, mostly because 2012 was SO awesome I can hardly wait to see what this brand new year has in store.
I’ve set some goals for myself for the coming year, and have already started on several of them.

I commit to writing something for this blog– even it’s only one line– every single day for the next 365 days.

I commit to continue on the path I started last January when I joined the Y to learn how to swim. I’ve signed up for Advanced Swimming classes with my teacher, Eddie Langer. I’ll be learning the butterfly stroke, bilateral breathing, and working on my form for my other four strokes. Eddie is a GREAT teacher, and I’m happy to be working with him again.

I will take up strength training to help me with my kick. That should be fun!

My goal is to lose 40 lbs. in 2013. I lost 25 lbs. in 2012.

My friend Peg Streep and I want to bring Grandmother’s Giftback to the marketplace this year. That was the best-selling memory book that we did in the late 90s for C. R. Gibson. It sold 250,000+ copies while it was in print. It fell between the cracks when C. R. Gibson was sold, and resold, and sold yet again to new parent companies. We reverted the rights, and will either place it with a new publisher or self-publish. I’ve already started scanning the art, and will be working on the redesign over the winter and into the spring.

I want to complete my first draft of Missing Dad by the end of the year. You can read some excerpts of what I’ve got so far, starting here.

I want to update and reformat The Warrior Queen’s Guide to Copyright, Contracts and Negotiation and self-publish through both e-books and print-on-demand. I’ll publicize and promote through social media, like this blog, Facebook, and Twitter.

My plans for this new year are ambitious. The most important thing to me, more important than the goals I’ve listed, is to be mindful and reflective while I am working toward those goals, and to measure my progress toward them by means that are less material and more spiritual.
I want more than anything for my heart to be open. I want to do everything I do with an eye to a greater purpose, one of service to the world.
I want my work to be a form of prayer. I want those prayers to be “Open my heart”and “Not my will, but Thine be done”. It sounds counterintuitive to say “I want (whatever)” and at the same time to ask that my wants be subordinate to God’s will. It is and it isn’t. I know that I have most often found joy when I stopped looking for it and let it find me.

This is a threshhold I am standing on, a door to a new room I’ve never before entered. My plan is to walk through it, head held high, heart held open, and just do the very best I can.
I wish and hope the same for you.
Happy New Year! Be brave, be joyous, be open, and love as much as you can, with every breath you take.

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When Sandy came up the New Jersey coast almost two weeks ago, a lot of that beach, that boardwalk, those cute little pastel-colored houses by the shore that people live in (some for the summer, but a lot throughout the year) were washed away, flooded, destroyed.

My family is safe. The most that any of us lost was phone or internet for hours or days. None of us lost power. None of us flooded. We are safe, and well, and warm, and thankful for all of that.

In between the time I last blogged and today, I got the MOST PERFECT JOB in the world. To say that I am grateful, and thankful, and blessed, and happy about that doesn’t quite express the depth and breadth of how I feel. I’m the new office manager for the Flushing YMCA YouthBuild program. For the first time in my life, I have the chance to use my skills in a setting that truly aligns with my personal values. I walk to work every day. On days when I take a break, I swim on my break, one floor down from my office. I am in heaven.

If you’ve been following my blog for awhile, or if you know me in real life, you know that I’d been looking for a full-time job for about a year. I’d gotten close several times, but somehow didn’t get the jobs I thought I was perfect for, jobs for which I was well-qualified, and where the interviews went really well. In June, I got the first serious freelance assignment I’ve had in a long-time; a wall calendar/desk calendar project for a conventional publisher (i.e., not print-on-demand). My work will once again be sold in stores next year!

So, I thought, the message from God was this:

Claud, forget fulltime, do your freelance gig, take the time to swim and get your body working in good order. I’ll take care of the rest.

Wisely, I decided not to argue with the Supreme Being, and said to myself, “Not my will, but Thine be done.”

All summer, I worked on my calendar project, swam laps three or four days a week, went to the beach with Barbara at the end of the summer, and researched health insurance plans for freelancers, since my COBRA would expire at the end of October.

The last week of August, I knew the schedule for the Y pool would be changing, so I went on the website to check it out. While I was there, I clicked on the careers tab, on impulse. I found the posting for the job I would win within the month. I emailed my resume at 11:30 on a Saturday night, and Monday morning (while I was at the pool) the man who is now my boss called me to come in and interview. Three interviews and four weeks later, he hired me for this wonderful, amazing job that every other thing in my life has prepared me to do.

Grateful, thankful, blessed, happy doesn’t even begin to describe how I feel.

I’m almost finished with the calendar job (the wall is done, I’m finishing up the desk). I’m taking Intermediate Swim with Eddie Langer again on Sunday mornings. I swim once or twice a week on my lunch breaks; once I finish the calendar, I can get back to swimming four times a week.

If I hadn’t joined the Y back in January, I would not now have my new job. If I hadn’t been looking for the new pool schedule, I’d never have seen the job posting almost as soon as it went up. There is more than luck and coincidence at work here; what there is, is grace, the grace that follows the acceptance of the will of God when one’s own works have proven fruitless. It’s a lesson I have to relearn periodically, but every time I relearn it, I absorb it a little more deeply.

This year, my birthday falls on Thanksgiving Day. I have so very much to be thankful for; work and love, the safety of my family and friends, my new friends and students at my new job, the opportunity to use my talents and skills for a higher purpose. Once I let go of my own idea of what I thought God wanted me to do, my journey was made clear to me, and I took it. It was a roundabout route, and I had many doubts and fears. I had some very dark times, but I held fast, even though I didn’t know what would happen next. I had to step out of the boat, and take the Hand that was extended to me, and trust that I would not fall and drown.
And I didn’t.

So, when my sibs asked me what I wanted for my birthday this year, I told them I had everything I want and need. Instead, I asked them to donate to Hurricane Sandy relief efforts.

If you and yours are safe and well, and you want to celebrate Thanksgiving (and my birthday) by helping those who have lost so much, here are a few ideas:

Thanks for listening–Now that we’re all caught up, how did you and yours fare in the storm? If you have any links to local charities who are helping people in your neighborhood, post them here, and please share my links with your friends.
Thanksgiving may be two weeks away, but it’s never too early to be thankful.

Illuminations~ November 2014 page

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A week ago this past Friday, my sister Barbara and I went to Point Pleasant, New Jersey and swam in the Atlantic Ocean.

Me, trying to take a picture with my phone for the very first time.

It was my first time at a beach, my first time in the ocean, in thirty-six years.
The reason I avoided the beach for all that time is the same reason I avoided swimming altogether for all those years — shyness, embarrassment, not wanting to expose my (now less) ample flesh to the eyes of strangers.
Spending this year learning to swim, and swimming laps four days a week now, and losing twenty-two pounds so far, have all disabused me of the notion that how I look in a swimsuit is or should be important to anyone but me. (And anyway, now I can outswim a lot of the people who might cast a critical eye my way…)

Oh, that’s how.That little thingie goes CLICK.

How can I ever even begin to describe the pure sensory pleasure of floating on salty swells of ocean, my red-painted toes pointed toward Portugal, the hot sun warming the anterior surface of my body, the cool water supporting my back, legs, thighs, arms?

The way one floats on salt water is so different from fresh; the buoyancy is not just physical, but spiritual.

We recollected the many family beach trips over many years when we were children; she reminded me that our dad woke us all up VERY early on beach days by shouting “REVEILLE!” in his un-gentle clarion tones, repeatedly, until all five of us were awake and moving around.

Because my bedroom was next to the kitchen, it was usually the aromas of frying Italian sweet sausage and chicken wings that woke me before his voice did — that was the beach fare my parents cooked and packed every weekend, along with a jug of ice cold lemon or root beer Fizzies (never Kool-Aid!).

My job as the eldest was to help Dad pack the beach chairs, the umbrellas, the beach blankets and the towels, the totes of extra clothes, and Grandpa’s old suitcase (which held the food for the seven of us).

When Janet was old enough, she would help, too; by the time I aged out of the beach trips (because I thought I was way too cool at 19 or 20 to go the beach with my parents and little sisters and baby brother), even John was helping carry all of our equipment and supplies back and forth to the car.

“Barb, I think Mom and Dad are smiling down on Daughters #1 and 4 today,” I said to my sister, as we floated and swam and made the oceanic equivalent of snow angels.

My parents loved Jones Beach; they were beach missionaries, too. They converted my brother-in-law Wally’s parents to their beachy faith, meeting up with them at Field #2 or 4, or at the West End beach.

They took fewer supplies in those latter days– their chairs, their umbrella, some food; it was just the two of them in the car on the LIE and then the Meadowbrook, not the epic beach trips of our childhood.

Those beach trips–every Saturday and Sunday, and almost every weekday of Dad’s two-week summer vacation, if the weather was good– are such sweet, rich memories… the long, long summers of my childhood, adolescence, early adulthood…all the books I read, all the sketchbooks I filled at Jones Beach.. all the photos my parents took, documenting their growing and then grown family.

How I treasure them…

One of my very first times at the beach.
Summer 1954

Me and Dad at the beach.
Summer, 1955

At the beach
Winter 1963

Me at the beach.
Summer 1966

Me, figuring out for the first time how to take a picture with my phone.

Oh, that’s how.
That little thingie goes CLICK.

#1 Daughter

#4 Daughter

Thank you, Barbara, for continuing the Karabaic family beach tradition,
and for including me in them.

I can’t wait to go back.

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…and THAT is as good a reason as there is.
We all have stories; they differ in the details, but the themes are common, universal.

I started writing Missing Dad when my father disappeared. A lot of the detail in what I’ve written so far is extracted from emails, texts, and “notes to self” that were contemporaneous with the events I’ve described.
I am writing it because I don’t want to forget. I want my nieces and nephew to have a record of what happened, so that they can share our family’s story with their children and grandchildren and beyond.
The one day I didn’t do any contemporaneous writing was the day he was found. I was home that day; no need to email, no need to write notes-to-self.That was the hardest day for me to write, because I had to dig deep into my memory and excavate the day, moment by moment. I was blocked on writing that day for months, because I wasn’t ready to do the necessary digging.

But dig I did; my need to tell them, and you, and everyone else the Things I Once Did surpassed my fear of the pain I anticipated that my digging would cause me.
The pain, as it turned out, was not so bad. Swimming really helped open me up to it.

My writing about my swimming is something else; it’s recording a quest. It’s my personal Odyssey.
It’s going very well, by the way. I now swim laps for an hour to an hour and a half, three or four times a week, once a week with fins.
I figure I am swimming about three to four miles a week.My breaststroke is now my best stroke; I’ve taught myself how to do an open turn at the end of the lane. My hands hit the wall, I fall back, turn over and push off with my feet. It’s not quite pretty yet, but it is highly functional.My bully has returned to the pool several times since I first told you what happened. There have been no further confrontations, which is a good thing. I’d hate to have go all WQ on her, and you know I would.(Forewarned is forearmed. What got me last time was that it was a surprise attack.)

I hope these are stories that you like to hear. I tell you about me, and in doing so, I am trying to tell you about you.
The details are different, but the plots are universal: love, loss, quests, successes, failures, two-steps-forward-and-one-step-back.
It is all a journey; thanks for listening to mine.

Please share yours, too. If you have a blog, please post a link in my comments and I will add you to my blog roll if I haven’t already.
If you don’t have a blog yet, why not start one?

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It wasn’t always a crime against nature for women to be fat. In many societies, it still isn’t. In America, it is.

Never mind that more than 35% of American women are considered obese. Men have caught up, by the way; more than 35% of men are considered clinically obese as well. If you examine the statistics more deeply, you’ll see that rates of obesity are higher in lower income groups, and higher among non-whites. Very few members of the 1% are obese. For the most part, it’s not a #RichPeopleProblem.

Is it possible to be fat, and be healthy? Yes, it is.
I’m fat. I swim laps four times a week. My IQ is higher than my cholesterol count. I can walk four or five miles before I feel any discomfort. My blood pressure is normal. I do not have diabetes. I cook from scratch almost every day, using organic meat, fish, poultry, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, legumes, olive oil, real butter, and no salt. We don’t drink soda in our house; we drink black coffee with breakfast, wine with dinner, and water the rest of the time. We avoid fast food and almost all processed foods. We eat real cheese, and drink skim milk. Where we go off the reservation is in portion control, but we’re working on that. We’ve both lost a significant amount of weight since I started swimming and walking in January.

When you see someone who is fat, what is your first thought?

The modern American iconography of fat is this:LazyStupidPoorIncompetentUnemployed/UnderemployedSingleUnlovedLonelyDepressed

Fat represents abundance, riches, sumptuousness, plenty in ancient cultures. The goddesses of pre-Christian times were portrayed as being ample of hip and thigh, buxom, callipygian.

The goddess illustration I posted above was one I did for Peg Streep’s book Altars Made Easy. Her name is Inanna, and she is the Sumerian Goddess of fertility, sexual love, and warfare.
She is said to have indulged in many behaviors that, in our culture, are now reserved primarily to skinny supermodel reality show housewives who have had extensive plastic surgery to enhance what God gave them.
Inanna came by her attributes naturally, though. She also took down a MOUNTAIN that offended her. Really, you have to be careful about what you say about certain fat goddesses.

I’m writing and posting this as a reminder that, as there are trends in fashion and music, there are also trends in thought. It’s trendy now to cite obesity as one of the things that is really wrong with America. If you want to know more about the truth behind this trend, read Fat Politics or The Obesity Myth.
If you want to see the kind of things that fat prejudice leads to, watch the video of Karen Kline being bullied by her charges on the school bus. She’s now almost $700,000 richer, thanks to the Indiegogo fundraiser that Max Sidorov started on her behalf. The bullies have been suspended from school for a year.

Just to be clear, I am not saying that being fat makes me better than any skinny woman with the same talents and experience as me. I am saying that it’s another one of my characteristics (middle-aged, white, half-Croatian, half-Greek, lapsed Catholic, aspiring Christian, liberal Democrat, artist/writer, creative type, stubborn, persistent, intelligent, no-nonsense, hard-working, pragmatic, idealistic are some others).

I am not my fat.I AM MY SELF.

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